Thread: The Stuff of Life

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Ghost of a supernova: Like a tag team of cosmic "Ghostbusters," two space telescopes have joined forces to capture the fading remnants of an exploded star — helping to shed light on how such blasts enrich the universe with the complex stuff of life.

Today's image of the supernova remnant N132D combines views from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory: Chandra picked up X-ray readings for the large, bluish horseshoe of gas that sweeps around the left side of the image. Hubble, meanwhile, picked up readings for the smaller, pinkish horseshoe on the right half of the image.

Both horseshoes represent "shells" of gas that have slammed into the surrounding interstellary medium, creating shock waves and sparking characteristic emissions of radiation. In this processed image, pink indicates hydrogen emissions, while purplish wisps represent oxygen emissions.

The combination of Hubble and Chandra imagery illustrates how two telescopes are better than one when it comes to dissecting the innards of stars.

In the latter stages of its life, a star's fusion furnace combines lighter elements (like hydrogen) to create heavier elements (like oxygen and even weightier stuff). When a massive star blows up, those heavy elements are blasted out into space, eventually ending up inside a newborn star and its surrounding disk of dust and gas.

Astronomers believe that's how many of the key elements we see on Earth — ranging from carbon, nitrogen and oxygen all the way up to uranium — got their start. Studying supernova remnants such as N132D helps scientists understand how the process works.

N132D's entrails are particularly interesting because the star is thought to have blown up relatively recently: about 3,000 years earlier than the current view. That provides plenty of fresh material to analyze.

N132D is about 160,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy on the suburbs of our own Milky Way galaxy. That means that the light we see today actually left the scene of the supernova about 160,000 years ago. Thus, when we say the blast occurred "recently," that's a relative term (or perhaps a relativistic term).

To generate the kinds of emissions detected by Chandra, the gas in N132D's larger shell must have been heated to 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius), researchers say. And the shell is still moving outward, at a speed of more than 4 million mph (2,000 kilometers per second).

For more views of N132D, check out a couple of golden oldies from Hubble and Chandra. And for highlights from the past month's worth of space imagery, don't miss the latest "Month in Space" slide show.

-Alan Boyle

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